Not just Muslim protagonists, but a ‘halal’ tone too ... Finding Fatimah

In an early scene in the new British comedy Finding Fatimah, the hero is meeting potential brides. But one is nowhere to be seen: to protect her from men’s gazes, her pious brother has taken her place, and is now rhapsodising creepily about her “beautiful, pale skin”. It’s a moment that neatly nods to the difficulties facing British Muslim film characters: they are notable either for their absence, or for being crammed into someone else’s narrative.

The arguments for diversity in film are well rehearsed. Last month Riz Ahmed warned the House of Commons of the risks when young people from BAME backgrounds are not allowed to be “heroes in our stories”. Others point to the pool of stories and talent missed when one class, ethnicity or gender dominates a creative industry. Then there is the effect on quality: according to the British Film Institute, 40% of the public thought BAME characters were represented in a tokenistic way – rising to 69% among Asian communities and 76% in Black African and Caribbean communities. It’s hard not to link this dismissal with the fact that in 2015 just 3% of those working in the film industry had BAME backgrounds.

Finding Fatimah, which tells the story of Shahid and how he overcomes community disapproval of his divorce to find love, offers a different approach. Commissioned by British Muslim TV, and with a cameo by YouTube star Guz Khan, it was picked up by Icon for distribution in the UK as a potential breakout hit. Courting the Muslim pound is a savvy move, says Shelina Janmohamed, author of Generation M, which identifies a new, global generation of young, affluent, Muslim consumers. “The Muslim demographic is bang in the middle of the teen-to-early 20s target group, so it’s a growing audience for distribution companies and cinemas at a time when those audiences are (more generally) in decline.”

Finding Fatimah’s inception fits into a broader trend of Muslim entrepreneurs fulfilling the demands the wider industry is ignoring, says Janmohamed. Which here means not just Muslim protagonists, but a “halal” tone; the lovers seal their relationship not with a Brief Encounter-style kiss, but an embarrassed discussion about embracing not being allowed.

It certainly could not be further from the first successful British Muslim film, Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette, released in 1985. It follows Omar as he hurtles headlong into delivering drugs, rekindles a love affair with Daniel Day-Lewis’s Johnny – a former skinhead – and, of course, starts his glamorous launderette. The film laughed at Margaret Thatcher, contained mixed-race gay love scenes and, finally, noted British Indian film-maker Udayan Prasad, “showed that films with Asians in them could make money”. Critic and author Sukhdev Sandhu also suggested it had a huge effect on British Asians, who had previously only seen themselves on screen as the butt of jokes in sitcoms like It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. Certainly not as the “pushers, tyrannical ex-foreign ministers, bogus mystics, brutalising landlords, togged-up likely lads, sex-hungry cripples” of Kureishi’s fiction.

Today Kureishi tells me, “The reaction was exactly what you want. It annoyed and shocked people – especially in terms of representation of homosexuality in the community. But young people were cheering that someone from their background was writing about them. It was shock and liberation.”

Kureishi followed up with Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and the TV series The Buddha of Suburbia (he is currently working on two TV projects) but says, 30 years on, too little has changed. “When I started I thought the doors would open [for others]. There are still very few black or Asian directors. Not a lot is going on with producers or where the money is.”

By the 90s other British Asian film-makers were piling in; in 1993 Gurinder Chadha’s cheery Bhaji on the Beach blasted stereotypes of passive Asian women with stories of hidden pregnancies, abusive husbands and illicit relationships. In 1995, Brothers in Trouble followed the tribulations of a group of illegal immigrants in the 1960s. Then came Ayub Khan Din’s East Is East, set in Salford in the 1970s and based on the writer’s childhood memories of rebelling against his violent Pakistani father and white working-class mother. In one memorable scene an arranged marriage is scuppered when an “experimental” art project (a silicone model of a vagina) is flung into the lap of the prospective mother-in-law. The 1999 film became one of the most successful of the decade.

Ethnicity, rather than religion, gave these films a distinctive character as they mined tensions between first-generation parents and their British children, often with a backdrop of casual racism. For young Asian film-makers they created a sense of optimism, says Kidulthood director Menhaj Huda. Chadha might have to wait another seven years, and move to the US, to make her follow up, but the future seemed bright. “There was an upsurge in Asian talent, in music, in television Goodness Gracious Me was on, and in film Asif [Kapadia, the director of Amy] and I were making shorts.”

Then, after 9/11, everything changed. Chadha continued to make smash-hit films like Bend It Like Beckham (Viceroy’s House, her current film about partition, sparked controversy). Meera Syal’s Anita and Me came out in 2002. But representations of British Muslims shifted. “There was a period when virtually all brown or Asian characters were terrorists,” recalls Huda. “Sometimes these films were politically correct, and sometimes they weren’t, but neither was productive.”

East is East ... one of the most successful British films of the 1990s. Photograph: Allstar/Film 4

A desire to “explain” British Muslim communities and their possible radicalisation came into focus. When, in 1997 Kureishi got My Son the Fanatic made (with Prasad as director), it lingered on a liberal father’s reaction to his son’s growing fundamentalism. But Yasmin, which came out in 2004, charted what cultural studies lecturer Nicole Falkenhayer calls the “dis-assimilation” of a British Muslim. And its creator, Scottish director Kenny Glenaan, spent a year interviewing British Muslims, giving it an anthropological feel.

Yasmin, a young woman pressured into marrying a Pakistani cousin, secretly removes her headscarf every day to jump into a bright-red convertible and speed off to work. When the Twin Towers fall, so do her bonds with wider society: she is taunted by colleagues, and her husband is unjustly imprisoned. She is “forced into a new, positive, relationship with Islam,” says Falkenhayer, while her drug dealing brother becomes a jihadist. In 2007 Channel 4 drama Britz echoed this, with one sibling rejecting terrorism and the other becoming the first British female suicide bomber. By 2010 even the interfaith comedy The Infidel, starring Omid Djalili, has a radical Islamic preacher in its story of a Muslim father who discovers he was born a Jew.

None of these films, nor the brilliant Four Lions which followed them, have Muslim writers or directors, notes Falkenhayer. And while Ae Fond Kiss and Brick Lane offered some respite from terrorism, British Muslim film-makers have been frustrated in attempts to add alternative narratives, says Huda. His second film, Everywhere and Nowhere, focused on a Muslim DJ but in the industry more broadly “there was a refusal to engage in stories about normal people who were not extremists”. This even applies to films with BAME casts or issues – few of which have BAME directors, he says. According to Directors UK (where Huda is chair of the diversity committee) only 3.5% of their members are BAME and only 1.5% of TV programmes they sampled were made by BAME directors.

Religion is just one facet of the character ... Riz Ahmed in City of Tiny Lights

Frustrated by the glacial pace of change in the UK, Huda is moving to the US. “I think the opportunities for BAME directors is very limited here.” It’s a frustration Sally el Hosaini shares. Her first film, My Brother the Devil, won numerous awards and was, she says, inspired by the feeling that “portrayals of British Muslims are tokenistic”. Focusing on two British-Egyptian teenaged brothers, her film looks at masculinity, gangs and homophobia. But, she says, not only was it hard for a female director to get such a film made (between 2007-14 the average proportion of women film directors was 12%), but there was a resistance to a film that didn’t fit into a prescribed pattern. “People wanted me to make one of the brothers a terrorist,” yet, she says, “the world is hungry for films which break those moulds.”

The latest Riz Ahmed film, City of Tiny Lights, manages to make the religion of the hardbitten private detective he plays just one facet of his character. But for film critic Kaleem Aftab, this and Finding Fatimah cannot disguise the need for a radical structural change. “It’s getting worse. It’s harder to make any sort of film, but especially one that doesn’t fit into an established box office success story. From the way films are commissioned to the distributors, to sales, to film-makers – nothing is set up to support niches.”

Yet continuing to ignore different voices, says Kureishi, is fatal. “Culture only develops through new artists, writers and subjects,” and this matters because “where else can we talk about the most important things?

“Muslim, Black and Asian people are still being spoken about in the media, but our voices are still rarely heard.”